The Hidden Persuaders has not convinced me otherwise, and no arguing back and forth between us will ever change that. I maintain I know best the contents of my mind, and, seemingly, you “know” I’m wrong.
LOL! Still ignoring what I write, still twisting white to black. (Nice to see too that you set such a high tone for our exchange in advance! I'll follow your sledgehammer, sarcastic lead.) I have to admit, you have persistence, even if it involves only reiterating what you've said, without considering anything I may have responded in kind.
May I remind you that I'm not the one making arbitrary, absolutist judgements...? Does this ring familiar? Say it in your own voice:
"I have an absolutely clear understanding of the positive and negative aspects of the US. But I do love this nation for all the reasons I have stated. Reagan didn't make me think these things. Nor Clinton, nor Karl Rove, nor anyone else. That may be your jaundiced view of patriotism, fable, but it ain't mine - and I know far better than you what is in my head, and how it got there."
I can only reply to you as I have, before, because my response made (I thought) excellence sense, and you've never rebutted my points:
"With respect, this is also the argument that has been repeated for ages by everybody who has willingly marched to the insane tune piped by their national leaders, whenever that insanity was pointed out to them. I am logical; I think for myself. Nobody could put one over on me. We, thre Romans, are the freest people in the world, with the best laws, because I know it. Just as we, the English, own France by right of our sovreign's being the formerly Count of Normandie, there; and we'll die to prove it! Nobody had to tell me these things. I sorted them out on my own. Anybody who says otherwise is either a damned cynic, or working for the other side.
Okay: fine. You're incredibly knowledgeable, you know all the inner workings of your government, you've never believed what you've been told, and research the facts challenging your dearly held beliefs all the time. You have never made mistakes by accepting what you were told as fact without checking those facts against sources that completely disagree with the original. You are utterly unlike the hundreds of millions of Americans for example who accepted LBJ's claim that North Vietnam had lauched an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin; or that the South Vietnamese people loved their government, which was an upstanding model of democracy. For the rest of us, I can only acknowledge that 1) I was taught patriotism through standard classroom textbooks proporting to be history, and beginning in elementary school, all the way up through high school; 2) so, according to what I've been told by my nieces and nephew, were they; 3) examples of similar books exist in German, English, French, etc, and can be purchased in flea markets in their native countries; 4) patriotism simply doesn't exist when it isn't taught to youth before "the age of logic," because there's no evidence of it in cultures where it hasn't been inculcated in youth."
Hey, throw at me your old arguments, I'll respond with my old responses, every time. Especially when you never dealt with my responses in the first place.
As for me: I acknowledge being influenced, and buying things in the past on impulse which I later analyzed using the tools I'd learned in my college advertising classes. That's why I ultimately stopped watching television ads, and why I developed the habit of looking at an ad first from the viewpoint of determining what somebody wants me to buy, what responses they're trying to invoke, and how.
I would go even further, and say that Packard is simply wrong that people would stop buying stuff – for any reason. Though my knowledge of psychology is limited to a single Psych 101 class, my personal view of human nature is that we are a restless lot. I think we are always looking for new things.
As you would say, go back to your class. History shows over and over that styles in a host of areas shifted glacially until the marketing of merchandise became the recognized major force in sales. Leaving aside tiny niche markets like Louis XIV's ladies at court, you'll find that clothing in general changed styles over decades. Music favorites remained favorites for several successive decades. New housing remained relatively constant in style for at least 50 years. Advertising is based on the idea that people won't change unless you make 'em. You have to remind people that they have desires. If they don't, you create them. (Or as one of my professors put it repeatedly, "Advertising creates dreams.") With the advent of marketing in late 19th century and its great expansion in the 20th, new *needs* for a range of styles in both necessities and luxuries could be created. That's not a good or bad thing: it's simply a fact. How the tools of marketing/advertising are used and misused, differs from culture to culture.
As for the rest, I would disagree with many other specific points about Hidden Persuaders that you've stated, based entirely upon your personal beliefs (and sarcasm, your friend!) rather than any studies you've done versus Packard's, and considerable misunderstanding of what Packard's goals were or the environment he operated within. (I deeply admire anybody who shows the seriousness you do in writing, "Specifically, he quotes some guy..." without researching whom that guy is, or why Packard uses him as a source.) For example, “$12,000,000 would be spent by marketers in 1956 for research in motivation.” No indication of success." LOL! Success and failure was obvious in an industry in the mid-1950s that spent, year after year, so many millions on anything; and the costs have inreased exponentially since then. Someone thinks it yields quantifiable results! And Packard's point in any case was that the industry believed marketing/advertising would more than pay for itself, at a time when the average American didn't think marketing/advertising had any effect on their lives or was worthy of serious study. (Government and industry did, but they were hardly average.) Remember, Packard's book was the first--as you note, and then promptly forget.
But this is irrelevant to our exchange. Because in the end--returning to my main point, and the reason I even mentioned Packard, or suggested him as part of a series to be read--you will not accept as tenable the idea that people are influenced to believe something without having all knowledge, logic, and an absence of emotional involvement at their disposal. This is because you personally believe you have not. (Once again: "I have an absolutely clear understanding of the positive and negative aspects of the US."). This has nothing to do with whether colorful phones are better than black ones, and everything to do with the fact that many people do or buy things because they've been convinced by marketing, without any realization that they've been completely manipulated. You can't be, I know; I bow, as someone how has been thoroughly manipulated, before your rectitude and wisdom, which throws out every college degree in advertising/marketing and ever concept on which Madison Avenue has been based.
As a result, since you haven't been manipulated by advertising, others haven't, and I'm only being cynical. Your personal observations outweigh any research Packard or his many successors could have made, despite the fact that you've got nothing to back yourself up except personal opinion. Since this is the case, our argument is as useless now as it was when we first got into it. If you're the knowledgeable superman who knows what is the truth, the logical fallacy of whatever he hears, and the motivations of whatever he sees, of course I won't be able to demonstrate to you that the beliefs of we poor mortals are often determined by what we see and hear. Or that we are often at the mercy of people who study, research and control those desires, fears, and hatreds--such as I pointed out in relation to the use of radio as an all-encompassing propaganda tool in Nazi Germany, or the use of hate radio as the means to stir up people in the Rwanda/Burundi genocide, a decade ago.
Nazis and radio. Burundi and radio. Millions of people (save you) can be convinced that one thing is its opposite, and act upon that, with hatred or anything else, based on the marketing of misinformation or carefully massaged information, with a nice, heavy dose of emotive undercurrent. You're seeing your inevitable way around the lies isn't relevant to the fact that it happened on an enormous scale in these events, and continues to happen with less momentous consequences all the time: it's all about marketing. Marketing has the tools and the money, and history provides the proof that it can move mountains--and convince people they have everything they need to make intelligent judgments, all the time.
This whole discussion is actually bizarre. I'm trying to convince you of the foundation upon which Madison Avenue, advertising, and marketing were built and have operated for over a hundred years. I've taken course work, did marketing, visited and interviewed some of the big names, worked in and (twice) ran major market media over the years. I've seen the first round mockups of some celebrated advertising campaigns, the suggestions and alterations, read the research of focus groups showing whose opinions are changed, and when. I know: who cares?
Of course there's no reason you should accept any of it on hearsay. But from my perspective, your ability to know more than the CEOs I've interviewed and even the work I've done reads like a flight-from-reality. And why am I even trying to convince you of this? -No, don't answer that one. Even your constant penchant for sarcasm has to show some pity. I know I'm an idiot.
